Scanning of paper documents to convert them to electronic data has become a necessity due to government, legal and business requirements around the world. Further, unlike a decade ago when scanning of business documents was carried out in a special facility using large scanning devices, today, most scanning is carried out by office personnel and home users using small, portable scanning devices. In addition, there is a need to use electronic versions of paper documents within computer applications that users use on a daily basis, including but not limited to document viewing, word processing, electronic publishing, internet browser-based, and the like. Many such applications do not have the ability to communicate with a scanner. In order to incorporate electronic versions of documents into such applications, users must (a) purchase/obtain a scanning application; (b) learn how to use the scanning application, (c) figure out how to make the application communicate with the scanner, (d) scan to a location on the user's computer and in the right format for the target application to use the document, and (e) import the document from the user's computer into the target application.
While (a) is typically resolved by using the scanning application that comes with a scanner, (b) and (c) tend to be difficult tasks, especially for a home user or a small office user where the user is trained to use his line of business applications.
Most users are familiar with downloading images from a digital camera onto their computer. A similar approach that is simple for anyone to understand is needed for scanning documents into a user's computer or application. Prior methods such, as display of a digital camera as a virtual drive or an external storage device such as a hard drive or a thumb drive as a virtual drive, are limited to devices that contain previously captured and saved electronic documents only. The method outlined in this document represents a scanner to the user on their computer in a way that is much similar to the way a digital camera represents itself to the user but with the added ability to create electronic documents on demand.
There is a known scanning method in which when a user selects a virtual file containing a specific set of rules defining how a document should be scanned on a display of a personal computer, an application linked to the virtual file operates (refer to Patent Publication 1). In that method, when the virtual file is selected, availability of a scanner connected to a personal computer is determined, and scanning using the scanner is started. Scan data from the scanner is processed according to the rules associated with the selected virtual file, and the processed data is output. The virtual file is essentially a background scanning application with a predefined set of scanning parameters. However, it does not represent the scanner itself. Therefore, even if the virtual file is displayed to the user, it is unclear if the scanner is usable or not. For example, if the scanner's communication mechanism is not compatible with that of the virtual file, or if no scanner is connected, that mechanism will fail.
Patent Document 1: U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2009/0323128